Examples
Civil engineers, from the 1950s onwards, unwittingly caused a massive increase in the debilitating water borne infection schistosomiasis (bilharzia) for locals as a result of irrigation schemes that lacked simple low-cost countermeasures built in, simply because they had no knowledge of these countermeasures. Yet at the same time, the United Nations had already published guidelines explaining cheap countermeasures and how they could be built in to the design of the irrigation schemes: matters as simple as keeping velocities above a certain level to prevent the disease vector (a water snail) from attaching to the conduits. The civil engineers were victims of the relevance paradox because they thought they only needed to know about engineering issues such as concrete and water flows, not how to control flow velocities to prevent the snail species that carried the disease from multiplying, so they failed to seek this information.
The relevance paradox can and usually does apply to all professional groups and individuals in numerous ways. While there are many examples of wilful ignorance, there are also many cases where people do not look outside the paradigms they are operating in and thus fail to see the long term consequences.
Read more about this topic: Relevance Paradox
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
“In the examples that I here bring in of what I have [read], heard, done or said, I have refrained from daring to alter even the smallest and most indifferent circumstances. My conscience falsifies not an iota; for my knowledge I cannot answer.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)